Have you ever tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

Mary Oliver

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

I listened to Mary Oliver. I got up, put on my coat, left my desk. The fields were inviting me. The sea of life, parting, with perfect courtesy, let me in; the rolling greens, the sun shifting in bass registers beckoning the clouds whose lazy wandering had begun to acquire purpose. Fields of wheat, palms like waving hands from a jovial crowd, and birds sitting quiet waiting for the downpour.

I had read somewhere about the miraculous energy of the colour green - what it does to the heart of the mind, how it surges in random alleyways, creating ripples of fire in the verdant imagination. I have felt that. I have felt the tingling at the tips of my fingers, as the rain soaks the curling torsos of corn, and gambolls in the moist slides of sugarcane leaves. This is the world. This is what poetry has taught me. To, as Mary Oliver urges, with a persistence that is at once wondrous, and startlingly present, lift up the latch, open the door of the dormant soul, and step out into the green. What else is there?

In the poem I share today, Oliver enters the spirit of nature, with minimum fuss, as is her way. She slips into the bodies of other beings, and wanders through their dreams with an ease that is uncanny and spontaneous. It is no mean feat to find companionship in the wild. To become the grass, the bird, the creeping fern. And Oliver speaks as an insider, a being that is beyond humanity, that has found solace in the living breath of all that is outside the organised chaos of people’s creations. She speaks with the intuitive certainty of a native daughter of the earth. She knows the rhythms of the winds, and chides the reader, with an awareness that is so convincing that it cannot, but be true.

Mary Oliver would never presume to be the charioteer who carries vacant dreams to their homes in the wildness of the womb. But that is what she does. Everytime.
She reminds us of the silence that rings through the universe, and the golden thread of compassion that weaves through every living thing, and leaves us with the distinct awareness of our place in the world.